The Age of the Crackpot

“When Man ceases to worship God, he does not worship nothing, but instead worships everything.”–attributed to Chesterton

A big and discouraging part of online discussion is the discussion of how many people believe crank theories. To some extent this is the result of the ease of publication. There has always been a lot of crankery, but it never used to be in wide distribution. These days anyone can just go to X or Facebook or TikTok and talk up their crank theories and, if they hit the right notes, the engagement software will automatically give them wide distribution and it’s the startle emotions, fear and anger, that the engagement software will amplify. But feel-good AI slop is also a problem. One never knows how much of the inspirational stories one sees are true; I remember one which touched on a field I knew that had obvious error. All of this bad writing, now with a gloss of automated editing, takes us away from reality and it is hard enough to engage reality without it.

The Unfree Press

We have an odd sort of unfree press in the USA. People can, within broad limits, publish just about anything, but getting a wide audience? There are four major book publishers and a handful of mass media conglomerates, all with right-wing to far right ownership. What gets wide distribution is circumscribed, and much of what is published is vacuous. Even before “AI,” public discourse was full of blither. People are desperate for anything real to hang on to, and if they can’t find anything real, they’ll hang on to anything, even crazy things. The damaged US educational system doesn’t help, either; people need tools that will let them distinguish truth from falsehood, and the educational system doesn’t mostly give them those tools.

Harry Potter and the Bones of Empire

Two days ago “Big names in AI and Silicon Valley tech announced yesterday that they’re launching a boarding academy for 16 to 22 year olds.” (Faine Greenwood) And I commented, “This is a kind of modernized version of the English boarding school and those were actually pretty horrible. I mean, it’s fun to read boarding schools stories but think about what it was like to live them out! […] My spouse has an absolutely scathing critique of [the Harry Potter] books. I think I’m going to ask them to tell me again and write it out as a blog post!”

And I did, I interviewed them, and here is the result.

The Flapping of Angry Butterfly Wings, August 14, 2026

Wrote these exceptionally angry Bluesky posts over the past few days

• We seem to be suffering—the world seems to be suffering—a moral apocalypse. USAID cuts. Slavery in China. Genocide in Sudan. Environmental destruction. The list goes on and on. The wealthiest tech CEOs—Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Zuck—as well as many lesser figures are moral voids.

On the Countercoup, and the Trials After

“Stop saying history will judge them. Judge them now. With judges.”—Joe Sandow, writing at the beginning of the Biden Administration

We forget that the Nuremberg trials were military tribunals; the victors in a war enforcing their will upon the losers. Some of the victors chose to do so by exacting justice but nothing constrained them to do so; the Soviets wanted to have show trials but failed to get the other participants to agree.

At Nuremberg law was created to prosecute the crimes of the Nazis. “Crimes against humanity” was invented to describe heinous acts previously unimagined. These concepts led to the writing, decades later, of the Rome Statute and the creation of the International Criminal Court.

Review: Griffin, The Nature of Fascism

Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

A remarkable and remarkably dense book on the nature of fascism. Griffin, who seems to have read everything about fascist, protofascist, and reactionary movements of the first half of the 20th century provides what is probably the best working definition of fascism: palingenetic ultranationalism; that is, a movement based on the idea of nationalist rebirth of a people. I’m not equipped to judge such a densely researched and reasoned book, literally the densest non-mathematical book I have ever encountered, but Griffin is widely respected, except among Marxist historians.

Brief Remarks on the US-Iran War

(I seem to be laying out a foreign policy position. May the ghost of George F Kennan guide me.)